March - Book 3

The final book in the March series won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2016.  As with Books 1 and 2 it was written by GA Congressman John Lewis and it is about the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  Book 3 covers the period of time from September, 1963 when 4 girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL to August, 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.

The danger that has surrounded the marchers since the beginning of the movement gets pretty violent in book 3, violent enough to get the nation's attention.

The book opens with African American citizens being asked to count the correct number of jelly beans in a jar or the number of bubbles in a bar of soap in order to be eligible to register to vote.  Many voter registrars required literacy tests be taken by only African American applicants.  If they were able to pass these tests and actually get registered to vote their names were printed in the newspaper which made them targets for violence and to be fired by their employers.

There was some nasty politics between the movement and President Johnson who wanted total control over the movement so that he could have his moment being nominated by his party for president as well as trying to get votes in Congress for a voting rights act.  In the end, the Act was passed by Congress and signed into law.

The March books are incredibly powerful graphic novels.  They present the civil rights movement with extraordinary storytelling. While the movement began the year I was born, I remember watching many of these events unfold on tv when I was a child.  The book is just as gripping as watching the events as they happened.  Congressman Lewis did a great job at capturing the spirit of the times, a story he told from his memory.

More than highly recommended!

The Vineyard Victims

The Vineyard Victims is Ellen Crosby's 8th Wine Country Mystery and it is a wonderful addition to the series.  The story opens with the main character, Lucie Montgomery, swerving her car to avoid crashing into a car driven by former presidential nominee and billionaire Jamison (Jamie) Vaughn.  Vaughn crashes his car into the stone pillar that is the entrance to Lucie's vineyard.  Lucie does not hear him trying to stop his car and after he refuses her help to get out of his car she believes that he was suicidal. The car caught fire and Lucie heard his screams as the fire consumed his body.  Vaughn, however, told Lucie before he died that he wanted her to "tell Rick to forgive me."

Lucie soon discovers that there might be a connection to Vaughn's desire to die and a 30 year old murder that occurred when he was at college with his wife, campaign manager and a deceased friend.    A handyman, Taurique Youngblood, was convicted of the murder but a civil rights group, the St. Leonard Project, has taken on his case as they believe that he is innocent of this crime.

The author did a good job of weaving in characters and facts from earlier books in the series and anyone would be able to follow the plot without reading the earlier 7 books.  Facts about wine abound in the book which made the book fun to read.  The Vaughn's own a nearby vineyard and were planning to host a fundraiser to eliminate Vaughn's campaign debt by featuring a wine from the 1890s.  They had several bottles of the wine and only a select few people at the fundraiser, $20,000 per ticket, were going to have the pleasure of drinking the wine.  Lucie's winemaker, Quinn Santoro, believed that the Vaughn's tampered with this wine as it should have tasted like vinegar due to its age but that is a secondary story.  Most of the wine lore surrounded this wine, called the Norton wine, instead of Lucie's wines which is a little unusual.  However, it did not affect the enjoyability of this book.

Cozy lovers should take note of this series if they haven't already!

March - Book 2

The 2nd book in Congressman John Lewis's trilogy on the civil rights movement focuses on the period of time from November, 1960 to August 28, 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King made his famous "I Have a Dream" at the March on Washington, DC.  Rep. Lewis also spoke at that event.  As with Book 1, the story alternated between the 1960s and the Obama inauguration.

Book 2 did not seem to me to be as dramatic as Book 1.  However, some pretty dramatic events took place here.  The Freedom Rides, the killing of 3 Freedom Riders by law enforcement officers/KKK and the beginning of the push for a Voting Rights Act are depicted.  For the uninitiated the freedom rides were organized to protest a U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Boynton vs. Virginia where segregation on buses was upheld by the Court.

I am looking forward to reading Book 3 which won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2016.

Burma Chronicles

Somehow I missed reading one of Guy Delisle's travelogues, his 2008 Burma Chronicles. DeLisle has traveled throughout Asia with his wife who works for Doctors Without Borders.  He has written 4 travelogues from his travels with her.

In Burma Chronicles DeLisle manages to describe the daily struggles of life in a dictatorship without being political with his use of minimalist black and white drawings and his affiliative type of humor.  Each chapter addresses a different experience DeLisle had.  Some of these experiences include discovering a Time magazine that had been censored by articles being cut out of pages, finding the Rangoon neighborhood where the Army officers live and the supply of electricity and water is plentiful, and being prevented by armed soldiers from walking past Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi's home.

This is a serious book written in a humorous fashion but the author gets his point across.  If you haven't read any of the travelogues, Pyongyang, Jerusalem, Shenzen, and Burma Chronicles, I encourage you to read them.  For most of these places, society has not changed since the books were published so they should still be timely.